Retail + Digital

Tag Archives: Liketoknow.it

Fashion month has kicked off and already the digerati style-set are hot on the heels of the latest ‘influencers’ and their preferred social media platforms. As fashion designers, media publishers, retailers and luxury brands all assess their ROI across social media spend, it’s influencer clicks and double-screening activities that are driving digital trends this season.

Pin and click

Apple is jumping on the ‘pinfluencer’ band-wagon, with a collaboration for its App Store on Pinterest that launched during NYFW.

Apple’s App store on Pinterest, launched for NYFW

As Pinterest develops more Rich Pins, or pins that are instantly actionable like real-time pricing or store addresses, the appeal of immediate, one-click access is hard to ignore, especially considering Pinterest’s huge fashion following (ComScore has it at 70m visits per month according to WWD, with more than 5m fashion pins going live every day). So the App Store collaboration allows users to discover new iOS apps and install them without leaving Pinterest.

So far we’ve seen tastemaker pinning activity such as FarFetch Discover, ASAP54, Lyst, Spring and Snapchat all uploading dedicated content from NYFW and influencers such as Cara Delevigne and Olivia Palermo will be sharing their favourite apps for the duration of London, Milan and Paris fashion weeks. Photography and visual culture is also on the App Store’s content agenda, via pinning activity from iPhone photographers Katja and Mal Sherlock as well as designer Valentina Kova and visual storytelling app Steller.

* Apple’s Pinterest collaboration shows the strength of the visual-culture platform and the power of pinners as influencers. The one-click download mentality is indicative of Millennial behaviour and looks set to drive digital strategy across other social media platforms.

London’s double-screening focus

The triumvirate of London Fashion Week digital innovators: Burberry, Topshop and Hunter Original, all chose to focus their #LFW social activity on the captivating appeal of live-streaming their show, combined with live messaging app collaborations.

Topshop again took a democratic approach to sharing its Unique fashion show live online, and on six outdoor advertising poster sites across the UK at high-traffic locations such as London’s Westfield shopping centres.

Topshop Unique’s live stream show outdoor posters at LFW

Topshop partnered with Ocean Outdoor and Twitter for the live-stream show, during which online followers could shop for key trends by tweeting trended hashtags eg #military or #monochrome as the new AW15 collection was shown on the runway. Topshop’s e-commerce team had curated an offer of related merchandise looks ahead of utilising real-time data accrued from the @Topshop #livetrends dedicated show tweets. I tried it with a #70s tag, and alongside other live tweeters, we all received a link back, detailing 70s and floral looks that were instantly shoppable.

“Through Twitter’s listening power, we are allowing our global consumer to shop the trends as and when they happen, and give them insight and access into runway shows,” says Sheena Sauvaire, Topshop’s global marketing director. “The idea of live advertising is just beginning and this will be a first example of real-time shoppable billboards,” she adds.

Hunter Original did something similar, also via live-streaming its show on nine of Ocean Outdoor’s digital screens across the UK as well as it’s own website and social channels. It promoted real time m-commerce for key runway looks, by allowing viewers of the interactive screens free wifi in the busy shopping or transit locations and driving traffic to the Hunter Original mobile site to shop similar looks such as the Original Parka. The catwalk set featured an elevated scaffold runway, built above a pool of water and miniature waterfall. The sound of running water was intended as a nod to the Scottish highlands in an urban setting – reflecting the brand’s new metropolitan meets rural design DNA by creative director Alasdhair Willis. It was a subtle synaesthetic selling approach, giving a live experience an extra dimension.

* For both these digital campaigns, I like the idea that as consumers take to double-screening they are also double-seasoning – with one foot in next season’s trends, while simultaneously shopping current season looks.

Message me back

Burberry took a two-fold digital approach this LFW, ensuring its live-streamed show experience was interactive for its global audiences across multiple social media channels. Firstly Burberry took its Asia audience on a emoji fun filled journey to Europe, via a collaboration with messaging app Line. The luxury brand live-streamed its show on the network, reaching out to Line’s 170m monthly active users, mostly across Japan, Thailand and Indonesia. Line users sign up to the service for its emoji characters such as Brown the bear and Cony the rabbit, who this season, were treated to a sightseeing trip to London courtesy of Burberry. During their visit Brown and Cony watch the Burberry show alongside ‘new’ cartoon characters Cara Delevigne, Christopher Bailey, Mario Testino and Anna Wintour.

Secondly, Burberry again partnered with Twitter for a live-stream show experiment. When online fans used the hashtag #Tweetcam to the @Burberry account, they received tweet back showing a time-stamped photo from the runway, shot at the exact time the tweet was sent and carrying the user’s personal Twitter handle.

Burberry for Line messaging app at LFW AW15

Burberry AW15 Tweet Cam @Retail_Planner

I like the Line collaboration for its fun, storytelling journey that targeted Burberry’s core Asia market, as well as drive traffic to its own website’s Shop the Runway seasonal activity. Meanwhile the Twitter partnership is a highly personalised form of brand engagement, with all the emotion of a direct brand to consumer conversation.

Influencer-commerce

Instagram is driving the trend for discovery-commerce, especially for fashion brands utilising the innovative Liketoknow.it shopping app from RewardStyle. So it was just a matter of time before the two platforms collaborated with a designer brand to shop influencers’ key Insta looks live from the runway – step in Preen by Thornton Bregazzi and a handful of fashion bloggers to make it a first for LFW (after BCBG Max Azria did it in September 2014 for NYFW).

Preen by Thornton Bregazzi for Liketoknow.it Instagram

Preen by Thornton Bragazzi x Liketoknow.it at LFW

With its Liketoknow.it x Preen by Thornton Bregazzi partnership, Instagram is staking its claim to discovery-commerce at live runway shows. This is just the beginning, and as a digital and technology board member for the The British Fashion Council, Instagram’s Tracy Yaverbaun is likely to add a few more brands to the LFW ‘like to shop’ roster for next season.

As I explored in a post for DisneyRollerGirl late last year, discovery-commerce is also firmly on the agenda for ShopStyle and Amex. On their collaborative shopping platform, The Style Inspiration Hub, content is currently focused on fashion week themed posts for all four major fashion week destinations. If you missed DisneyRollerGirl’s pre-LFW insider tips post, read (and shop) it here.

This e-commerce/discovery platform is a collaboration that works well for both parties, and Amex is making the most of its influencer-driven association that mirrors its concierge service, the Amex Insiders, during LFW. There’s nothing like having a PA type service on tap between shows to sort out taxis, restaurant reservations and even IT support. The Amex Insiders team say they’ve dealt with a record number of nearly 3500 requests over the last five days, with popular restaurant requests ranging from the luxury fashion house themed afternoon teas at The Mandarin Oriental or hot new restaurant The Old Tom & English for its tapas-style take on quintessential British dishes.

* This is an updated version of a story that first appeared on DisneyRollerGirl.

1 Tinder-style shopping apps are to 2015 what visual-search apps were to 2014. As a new wave of swipe-to-shop apps such as Stylect or Mallzee enter our snacking screen-time, street-style photography influenced browsing will be replaced by the likes of ASOS’s New In app where a constant feed of newness keeps us coming back for more.

ASOS has launched a new personalised shopping service via its own group of online-influencer stylists

2 Augmented mirrors will make shopping for beauty a whole new experience. For example L’Oreal’s Make-up Genius app utilizes the front facing camera on smartphones and through facial mapping technology, the app can augment a range of L’Oreal’s key seasonal colour products onto the users face. If a shopper is using the app at a L’Oreal counter there are also products that can be scanned to instantly test the virtual looks. The 3D virtual mirror works by mapping 64 facial points and can be seen from whatever angle the user tilts their head and in real time.

L’Oreal MakeupGenius app

3 Big data is the new oil: know how to mine it and what it means for predicting product ranges or customer service demands. If consumers are used to giving away preference data for top ten lists on BuzzFeed, welcome to the new era of questionnaire driven, personalized retail eg Birchbox’s live customer data wall in its first physical store or The Fragrance Lab at Selfridges.

4 Wearables to screen your online life: wearable tech in 2015 needs to be functionable, useful & aesthetically pleasing, watch how brands like Altrius by Kovert Designs(new to Net-a-Porter for January) and Rebecca Minkoff are early trail blazers for functional jewellery designs that allow wearers to have their own personal digital detox and tap into the JOMO (joy of missing out) mindfulness trend.

Altrius by Kovert Designs

5 Social-commerce will come of age in 2015 via content curators on Instagram and workaround shopping platforms such as Liketoknow.it that drove 3% of Reward Style’s revenues in 2014 (since launching in March 14). Shopping on Instagram just got much easier thanks to a new wave of apps that know what you’ve liked and can instantly send you links to buy. Also see Shopstyle.it, Insta-Kors and Dash Hudson.

Content curation, discovery commerce, delivery wars and disruptive retail futures were all on the agenda at the Wired Retail conference, held in London last week. With a host of inspirational speakers from digital and physical retail fields, a retail-tech marketplace, plus a stage dedicated to showcasing 16 of the magazine’s best start-ups in the retail-tech arena, it was a day full of insightful commentary.

The conference was supported by Valtech, a digital insights and marketing firm, that advised the audience to ‘orchestrate the consumer journey through new technologies’, said MD George Smith, in a keynote address.

Social curators hijack content to commerce

Content curation is the key path to commerce according to Runar Reistrup CEO of Depop (a snap and sell app that’s a hybrid of Instagram and eBay), who said retailers are now thinking like social media natives.

‘Depop works for retailers as a flash-sale m-commerce tool. ASOS comes to us to sell in the same social context as Depop users, who follow their favourite sellers,’ he said, adding that the social element to selling product on Depop makes it more fun and engaging for the retailer.

MyTheresa festive list on Lyst

Chris Morton, CEO of Lyst calls it ‘distribution commerce’. ‘In the beginning, content came to commerce, now we are beginning to see the opportunity when it’s the other way around. Content is shared around the web and it’s instant commerce via Twitter or magazines that have ‘buy it now’ buttons,’ he said. Social commerce is relevant to mobile because everything is consumed on mobile – content is everywhere, he added. ‘Mobile blends the online and offline worlds – but we need to personalise the experience in an app.’

‘This generation is the best equipped to curate their own style,’ said Amber Venz, CEO and founder of Reward Style, in one of the conference’s most engaging presentations.

RewardStyle’s Amber Venz presenting her Coveteur case study

‘Content creators are the social influencers of the era. There are 9000 content creators on Reward Style and all of them create actionable, organic content that leads to commerce,’ she says citing a recent project with luxury re-sale site Coveteur to make its content more shareable and instantly actionable.

She says through training this group of style bloggers they are directly influencing online sales to the tune of $270m in 2014, an increase of 174% from 2013. Venz said that at the top level, influencers with Reward Style are earning around $100,000 per month in commissions.

In 2013 Instagram became the most popular platform for RewardStyle bloggers, according to Venz who launched Liketoknow.it in April 2014, as a work around platform for driving commerce from posts on Instagram. ‘Liketoknow.it has been more impactful that all the other social platforms combined. It has driven 3% of the retail sales generated from Reward Style bloggers, since it started eight months ago,’ she says.

Users who like a post can get immediate, daily, weekly or monthly information from Liketoknow.it, ‘95% choose to receive right now’ says Venz who describes the latest way to shop as ‘discovery commerce’.

Editorial shoot on http://instagram.com/disneyrollergirl

Omnichannel journey

Instagram is undoubtedly contributing to a paradigm shift in the way people shop online. ‘Instagram is image-led retail,’ said Tracy Yaverbaun, head of brand development, EMEA at the Facebook-owned platform.

Consumers use Instagram for ‘snacking into tunnels of visual inspiration – they used to look through a magazine for that, now they do it on a small screen 24 hours a day,’ she said adding it’s like a transportation window that’s open all the time – ‘mobile is the new shop window.’ Yaverbaun said Instagram is now fusing the phygital and digital retail worlds, giving examples from Banana Republic and Topshop that have both used imagery from their Instagram feeds in window displays – playing to the highly engaged mobile consumer practice of walking into a store and asking for product they’ve seen on Instagram.

Banana Republic Instagram window by Victoria Waterman

Citing Instagram’s own research, Yaverbaun said 60% of users on Instagram engage with people or brands they don’t know, simply to take them to a place of inspiration or to find people with similar passions. Yaverbaun said the company does not have an immediate commerce strategy to implement just yet. ‘We feel to focus on inspiration first is the most important thing to do, then we figure out the rest later.’

According to Chris Morton, CEO of Lyst, desktop browsing is slowing for the first time, while mobile continues to go through the roof for shopping on the go. ‘Channels are being bundled together in customer journeys, it’s difficult to understand only desktop in the equation,’ he says adding mobile has become a device for snacking but an app is for shopping now.

Tablets have a higher conversion rate than mobile, says Morton. ‘It’s snacking verses intent on tablets, which is why we built a universal checkout which let’s users add ten items from different retailers. It has improved convergence rates dramatically,’ he says. Lyst’s data is available to retailers and can help them understand what consumers bought with other purchases.

Morton’s tip for the future of retail is blended online and offline journeys via mobile. ‘Communicating with the consumer can be totally personalized with an app. For example if a customer is in a city for the first time, we can plan a shopping trip for her. The personalization element allows us to give her exactly the experience she wants, based on data.’

The mall is not dead, argued J Skyler Fernandes, MD of Simon Venture Group, a retail-tech investment arm of the largest mall operator in the US. ‘The mall is at the centre of what I call the ‘mall-ennial’ community. It’s the future of conversions and will play an increasingly important role between online and offline retail,’ he said in a keynote address Fernandes cited some recent retail stats to back up his statement: e-commerce conversion rates are still only 3% v 20-30% conversions from consumers visiting physical stores; in the US, ecommerce is worth $304 billion, but traditional retail is worth $4.4 trillion.

There is a role reversal of the physical and digital retail experience, says Fernandes as e-commerce becomes engrained in the physical store (through localized fulfillment and online sales being attributed to a physical location). On the flipside, in-store retail is increasingly becoming a digital experience. A growing number of online retailers are opening brick and mortar stores, for example Bonobos, Warby Parker, Birchbox, Rent the Runway and Trunk Club. Plus we have seen Holiday stores from mega-system giants, Amazon, Google and eBay.

Malls should provide unique community experiences for shoppers that want to visit physical stores, which is still where 90% of retail sales happen, says Fernandes. These consumers love technology but they’re not shopping exclusively online, they still visit the mall and they use their mobiles for an enhanced shopping experience. Retailers need to ensure in-store mimics the online experience and they will need to upgrade their stores to include free wi-fi, beacon technology and real-time inventory that they can search for on their mobiles, while in-store.